Heralding The Dawn Of A New Age--Docker Matures, Gets Industry Buy-In, And Makes Peace

Last week saw Docker, the open source container initiative, hold its conference in San Francisco. For those not aware, Docker builds upon the concept of Linux Containers. The idea being that distinct functionality can be packaged within a single container which helps with application creation and portability. Docker is an initiative which builds upon Linux containers and has seen massive industry and customer buy-in.

This year's Dockercon really marked the maturing of Docker into a genuinely disruptive and cross-industry initiative. There was significant news to come out of the event, but here are some highlights.

The Open Container Project

No more container specification battles - the schism between CoreOS and Docker seems to have been resolved and the news is all good for the community as runC, the new, default container standard, is given over to the Linux Foundation. All is, once again, happy in the Docker ecosystem.

Docker used the event to also announce Docker Trusted Registry, a way for organizations to securely store the different container images they have. The registry tool was first released in February but is now in general availability - it comes with Active Directory and LDAP support along with enterprise-friendly audit logging.

In terms of use, organizations can use the registry either on the public cloud or on-premises. Not wanting to be left out, IBM, Microsoft, Google and Amazon Web Services are all offering the product to their customers.

The logic of commercializing registry is obvious - the open source tool upon which this commercial product is based has been downloaded more than 6.5 million times. The U.S. General Service Administration is already a commercial customer for the tool.

Industry Offerings

Virtualization powerhouse
VMware announced a technology preview of a new initiative, Project Bonneville, a runtime that will allow customers of VMware's vSphere product to run applications built within Docker containers to run within virtual machines. According to VMware engineer Ben Corrie, the approach Bonneville takes is that the container is a VM, and the VM is a container. There is no distinction, no encapsulation, and no in-guest virtualization. All of the necessary container infrastructure is outside of the VM in the container host.

Not wanting to be outdone, Google launched Container Engine into beta, a tool for deploying and managing containers on Google's public cloud. Container Engine is priced at 15 cents per hour for “standard” clusters with as many as 100 virtual machine nodes and managed uptime. Google won’t charge anything for “basic” clusters with up to five virtual machine nodes and no managed uptime.

Plugins Included But Swappable Gets Closer

Docker previously announced that it would bundle peripheral offerings in with core tools but these would be swappable. A good example if software defined networking. As a direct result of its acquisition of SocketPlane, Docker is introducing some SDN capabilities but that is readily augmented by SDN plugins from vendors such as Cisco, Midokura, Nuage Networks, VMware, and Weaveworks.

This flexibility is enabled by using Docker's Compose project that will allow users to determine which containers should be connected together for applications.

New-Found Love From Microsoft

Microsoft has previously signaled an intention to get much more active with Docker. In a presentation by Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich at Dockercon, the audience saw the extent of that support.

In the presentation, Russinovich deployed an application on both Windows Server and Linux. Not only is Microsoft enabling this sort of cross-platform capabilities, but it is also enabling Docker development from within its own tools - Russinovich demoed a continuous integration system for testing and running containers withDocker Compose from within Visual Studio.

On top of the developer-facing tools, Microsoft's Azure Marketplace now enables the deployment of container-based applications from Docker Hub images right onto Azure.

MyPOV

I've said it before, but it's worth repeating: the Docker initiative has momentum that has been remarkable in both its speed and its breadth. There are very few large vendors who aren't investing resource in Docker-related initiative. There are a plethora of startups targeting Docker-related opportunities and, perhaps most importantly, there are a huge number of end-user organizations that are looking to use Docker for parts of their organization.

Dockercon took this momentum to a new level - while not attending in person, the maturity of the message, the products and the ecosystem was impressive to see.